Educating digital natives.

Educating digital natives. THE FIRST GENERATION OF "DIGITAL NATIVES"--those bornafter 1980 into a digital online world--now influences everything frompop culture to politics, and much research suggests that this generationof young students thinks, works and learns in a very different way fromprevious generations. These factors in particular have implications fornearly every aspect of society from parenting to education. In theirrecent book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of DigitalNatives, law professors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser present a thoroughstudy of the digital native generation, based on analyses of existingresearch as well as hundreds of interviews with digital natives and theteachers, librarians and psychologists who educate and observe them inthe United States and around the world. Palfrey is Henry N. Ess IIIProfessor of Law and vice dean for library and information resources atHarvard Law School, as well as faculty co-director of the Berkman Centerfor Internet & Society, a Harvard research center dedicated to thestudy of the development of cyberspace, in addition to Internet law andpolicy We spoke with him about the ways in which digital natives learnand absorb information, online safety concerns for students in thedigital age, and the implications for K12 school administration. Q: Describe the stages digital natives go through as they absorbinformation. JP: This topic is an important and fast-changing area ofscholarship. The first stage is "grazing." Instead of sittingdown every morning to read the paper, for example, digital natives gothrough the day absorbing information, via a Yahoo reader, RSS feed,Facebook and the like. A subset will take the second step, the"deep dive," where they are looking for further analysis byclicking on a hypertext link, hearing a podcast, or seeing what theirfriends think. This stage is like actually reading a newspaper articleinstead of just the headline. The third step is the most engaged, the"feedback loop," where they engage the information on a deeperlevel, critique it and share it by posting it in their Facebook profileor on Twitter. The fear here is that students will only use these toolsto go through the first or second step. Students getting the mosteducational benefit and absorbing the most information are going throughall three steps. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Should this three-step process be replicated in schools, puttingthe focus on this methodology and not on the technology itself? JP: That's true, and I think that's crucial when we thinkabout technology. The technology should not dictate to us how we use it.We should instead ask the questions: "What do we want to accomplishin the classroom?" and "Can this technology help us?" Andif so, we should use it. The schools that figure out how technologyinforms pedagogy are going to have the most success. You argue that some digital natives are able to discern the qualityof information online while others are not. Do you see schools playing arole in helping young people do this? JP: Absolutely. This is one place where you can also bring inlibrarians. Historically, the job of a school librarian is to selecthigh quality information, to include that in a collection, make itaccessible, and help students find it when they need it. That sameseries of tasks is even more important in the digital era. So you believe that librarians are more important today, not less?Some may find that idea counterintuitive. JP: I do. I've heard a line many times, that because ofGoogle, librarians are obsolete in the digital age. That couldn'tbe further from the truth. There in fact is greater need for librariansto play a key role in giving students access to the best informationand, more importantly, in giving students the skills to do thisthemselves. Do the tools of the digital world enable this generation to be morecreative? JP: It would be a mistake to argue that kids today are morecreative than in the past. What we are seeing now are some veryinteresting ways to be creative, for kids to tell their own story.It's more YouTube and less Disney. The generally acceptedhypothesis is that in the digital environment there are possibilitiesfor student creativity that weren't there before, but it'sunclear whether this is the case or is just the hope of academics.Frankly, in our research, we found fewer examples of this than we hoped.In many respects there is a pathway [to greater creativity] there, butit is not happening on its own. The role of administrators needs to bepointing out the technological tools for creativity and encouragingtheir use. What steps can or should schools take to address digital safetyissues like cyberbullying or identity theft? JP: One crucial aspect of what schools need to do is to start aconversation grounded in real practice, to find out what young peopleare involved with online and get them to talk about it. The same rulesabout bullying apply to cyberbullying. It's more complicated insome respects because these environments keep changing. Nevertheless,the process needs to be one where adults are listening to young people,understanding their practices, and helping them to be smarter about howthey go about their lives in cyberspace. Most of the time, things are nodifferent in the digital space than they are in the physical space.What's changed here is the context, not the basic issues. Theonline practices that young people are engaged in are not as foreign asthey may seem initially to educators. You also describe information overload and multitasking asdownsides of the digital world and as impairing learning. Is there asolution to that problem? JP: I don't see information overload as acute of a problem asothers might; I think the amount of information available is more of anopportunity than it is a risk. Multitasking is a slightly differentmatter. I think that using distracting tools--checking e-mail duringclass, for example--is a bad idea. It may well be that students todayhave lesser attention spans. So having them pay attention and focus onthe task at hand is something to work on structurally. I don'tthink we should ban certain devices necessarily, but we should decidewhere these things belong and where they do not belong and structure ourschools accordingly. Are digital natives really learning authentically from some ofthese new technologies? Edugaming, for example? JP: The answer is "They can," of course, and they do. Butit's not necessarily sufficient. Research illustrates lots ofinteresting ways young people are learning from gaming and social media.I personally don't think games are the answer to reformingeducation; there are people that go much further on that continuum thanI would. But I think we can learn a lot from the success of gamedesigners, many of whom have created incredibly effective ways to engageyoung people and to get them learning while having fun. What is your view of mobile learning technologies--the use ofsmartphones and other such devices in schools? JP: I don't think of it as "mobile learning"; Ithink of it just as learning with a device that happens to he ahandheld. Yes, their use can change how young people learn, but Iwouldn't just aim for a world of mobile learning. I would ask ifthere is a way to extend our pedagogy to include these devices that somany young people are using, rather than the other way around and justusing them because they exist. There tends to be a "Gee whiz!" factor with so muchtechnology. We might say, "Isn't Twitter amazing?" butthe fact is, not that many young people are using Twitter. So why are wethinking about using it in school? Its use in the classroom is verylimited. Do you see a trend for the future with regard to how digitalnatives will be using technology in schools? JP: That's a great question. I see an overall trend ofteachers, librarians and administrators quickly getting much smarterabout how to use technology and where not to use it. This is happeningbefore our eyes, and I'm very positive about the changes I'veseen in the last few years, in talking to K12 educators and seeing howadeptly they are responding to the challenges and the opportunities ofthe 21st century. I think it's absolutely going in the rightdirection, but there is still much more work to be done in understandingyouth media practices and then figuring out what the implications areboth inside and outside the school environment. The adaptation is underway, but we need constant vigilance to what the data are telling us.Researchers are essential to this process, and we also need a mode oftranslating that research into education policy as we go.